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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 06:09pm Sep 1, 2002 EST (# 4106 of 4109)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Here's a very hard lesson - a lesson that may be, in some ways, an unlearnable lesson. Piaget showed a number of things that kids below a certain age just cannot learn for themselves, or use logically. Here's a kind of blindness that, at one level or another, we all have.

All any human being can ever do is construct patterns from available information - and check them. The pattern formation can be right or wrong - and there is no way to tell, in the end, except to check the checkable. That's not a point that distinguishes sanity and insanity. It is the human condition.

People get into trouble, and stay in trouble about many things because they don't know it.

For example, based on what I know, I think it likely that gisterme is either Condoleezza Rice, or a member of her team. That isn't something I know - it is an inference. I am sure that someone posts as gisterme claims both a lot of knowledge about military and high political affairs, and who also, from time to time, acts as if s/he has authority. Before March 2002, for example, there were some rather technical, and emphatic, discussions of the word "treason." And there's been quite a lot of technical discussion -- who ever gisterme is, s/he works at posting.

1254 rshow55 4/11/02 7:32am , for instance, refers to postings taking hard effort, and if s/he lives in the United States - hard effort at an inconvenient time for most people.

The following citations are lists, each link corresponding to 50 postings from gisterme - the bolded ones since March 2 of this year. I have them all. About 90% of them (more than 700) are after May 12, 2001, http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/198 - - and from gisterme's first posting it was clear that gisterme was acting as this thread's "Bush administration Sr. advisor stand-in" There is good reason to think that gisterme was aware of http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/198 :

2570 rshow55 6/17/02 8:09am ... 2471 rshow55 6/17/02 8:09am

2572 rshow55 6/17/02 8:11am ... 2573 rshow55 6/17/02 8:12am
2574 rshow55 6/17/02 8:12am ... 2575 rshow55 6/17/02 8:13am
2576 rshow55 6/17/02 8:14am ... 2577 rshow55 6/17/02 8:14am
2578 rshow55 6/17/02 8:14am ... 2579 rshow55 6/17/02 8:15am
2580 rshow55 6/17/02 8:16am ... 2581 rshow55 6/17/02 8:16am
2582 rshow55 6/17/02 8:17am ... 2583 rshow55 6/17/02 8:18am
2584 rshow55 6/17/02 8:18am ... 2585 rshow55 6/17/02 8:19am
2586 rshow55 6/17/02 8:20am ...

There have been some postings from gisterme since, some of them powerful and much appreciated.

rshow55 - 06:16pm Sep 1, 2002 EST (# 4107 of 4109)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

It seems likely to me, from some things gisterme has said, and an angry response to references about Stanford, and deans, that gisterme is Condoleezza Rice.

Politicians or journalists could easily check it. They might have good reasons to. I don't care that much. Gisterme has made the interesting postings gisterme has posted.

Whoever gisterme is, s/he works hard -- and when Putin and Bush were meeting last year - was active, minute by minute, working on what seemed to me as "spin control." If gisterme is not affiliated with the administration -- s/he's an impressive loyalist indeed.

I might also be wrong about my guess that kangdawei , who posted about 80 times in August and September last year was Ann Coulter - though she did put Coulter's web site below her name.

All anybody can do is "connect the dots" - make patterns, and then check them.

The checking part if very difficult for people to acknowledge. I've been resting mostly today, but thinking about the reasons, too. How can people be so very smart sometimes - and so stupid other times?

That's Plato's problem.

A major concern people have had for 2500+ years - and a question linked to many, maybe most stories that make the news to this day.

As for the point I've made, that it is about 1000 to a million times easier to defeat the BMD systems I've seen than build them - there's been a lot of detail about that, undisputed for a long time. So much that I'm taking my time thinking about how to present it. It has been carefully presented already. MD84 rshow55 3/2/02 11:52am links to a lot of that discussion.

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